The Important Things of Life examines women's work and family lives in Sweetwater County in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The discovery of coal in the 1880s caused a population boom, attracting immigrants from numerous ethnic groups. At the same time, liberalized homestead law drew sheep and cattle ranchers.

Dee Garceau illuminates the economic and social importance of women in the ethnically diverse working-class towns as well as in the decentralized agricultural and ranching communities populated by native-born, middle-class Anglo-American families.

Augmented by reminiscences and oral histories, this book traces the adaptations that broadened women's work roles and increased their domestic authority. Garceau also demonstrates how survival on the ranching and mining frontier heightened the value of group cooperation. Hers is a compelling portrait of the American West as a laboratory of gender role change, in which migration, relocation, and new settlement underscored the development of new social identities.