In Stegner’s novel, Bo Mason is forever chasing the next opening, the next town, the next reinvention. Elsa bears the cost. She keeps children fed, absorbs uncertainty, and turns one more uprooting into a life that can still be lived. Stegner does not flatter Bo’s restlessness. He shows the damage it does, and he shows who so often pays for it.

They did not live in the same West we inherited: the developed West of interstates, subdivisions, and established towns. They lived in the developing West of camps, rail lines, irrigation ditches, bad bets, and hard winters. We like to say that metamorphosis is motion, but motion is not growth. Growth requires continuity: someone to stretch scarce dollars, preserve order after disappointment, raise children in uncertainty, and stabilize a household long enough for tomorrow to arrive.

Again and again, that someone was a woman, building the foundation of what we inherited. Through the unwavering gravity of her sense of love and responsibility, she often did it with ambitions of her own education postponed, enterprise constrained, and independence traded away so the household could survive.

Maybe I see Stegner’s point so clearly because I have never really lived in a house that was not anchored by women. I grew up with my mom and my maternal grandmother. Today, I live with my wife and our two daughters. That is not a credential, but a blessing I did nothing to earn.

When I think about what makes a family durable, I do not first think of swagger or grand plans. I think of someone noticing what needs to be done and then doing it — quietly, repeatedly, without much recognition.

I thought about that again after hearing about WSU economics professor Doris Geide-Stevenson’s recent keynote at the Ogden-Weber Chamber Women in Business luncheon and her use of Claudia Goldin’s work. Goldin helped economics recover women as forgotten main characters of economic history. She showed that women had long worked on farms, in family businesses, and in homes in ways that were essential but badly undercounted, and that marriage, child-rearing, and social expectations often redirected or constrained women’s opportunities. Elsa’s labor may not show up neatly in a ledger, but it is economic labor all the same.

The women of the old West were neither scenery nor side characters. They were the load-bearing strength of households, the memory of families, the steady intelligence that turned volatility into continuity. They kept children alive, stretched thin money, preserved dignity after setbacks, and made homes out of conditions that did not deserve the name. If the developing West became the settled West, women were no footnote. In countless homes, they were the foundation.

Those often-forgotten women of history were also laying the foundation for something else: the entrepreneurial women of today. At Weber State’s Spring Research & Engagement Symposium, economics student Juno Zhou presented a cross-country study showing that education and gender income equality support female entrepreneurship, while adolescent fertility, debt, and family responsibilities constrain it.

The point feels continuous with Stegner and Goldin. When women have room to pursue their own ambitions, families and societies gain more of what they can build. When responsibility is piled onto them without enough support, they still often steady homes and communities, but at the cost of ventures, careers, and possibilities the rest of us never get to see.

I hesitated to write this because women do not need another man explaining burdens they have long understood. But perhaps men do need the lesson, and Stegner helped teach it to me.

The West we inherited did not endure because restless men like me were wiser than everyone else. It endured because women kept paying the human cost of instability until there was something stable enough to inherit.

So if today’s “tradwife” imagery wants a historical reference point, it should lose the soft focus. The real women of the West were not performing domesticity for an audience. They were doing load-bearing work, often at real cost to themselves, and building the foundation of our inheritance. As someone raised by women and now blessed to live among them still, gratitude and a little honesty about who built the West seem like the least I can offer.

Gavin Roberts is an associate professor of economics and chair of the economics department at Weber State University. He is a recipient of the Gordon Tullock Prize from the Public Choice Society and regularly shares his research locally, nationally and internationally. This commentary is provided through a partnership with Weber State. The views expressed by the author do not necessarily represent the institutional values or positions of the university.