What were the roles of women in westward expansion?

The nineteenth century saw a massive migration of Americans from the east coast to the west coast. In many ways, women had a more inclusive role to play in western society than they did back east.
Let us look at some of their roles:
The most common role played by women as part of western expansion was their duty to the family as wife and mother. While women had this responsibility back east, as pioneers, this role took on a whole new meaning. Women often lived in remote places in the west. This meant that they had to be a lot more self-reliant when it came to maintaining a household than they would have in the east. Child-rearing was usually conducted without the help of the social structures and institutions that existed in the east.
Pioneering meant living on the edge, and all members of the family needed to contribute. In addition to child-rearing, most women needed to work on the homestead as farmers. Labor was scarce, and in many cases, women worked as hard as their husbands and sons tending to the fields and animals.
For those women who migrated to Mexican lands, they also could serve as landowners. American law at the time dictated that a woman's property became her husband's upon marriage. There were few opportunities for women in the eastern part of the continent to own property. However, the female pioneers who settled the Mexican lands of Texas, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, and California were entitled under Spanish law to retain ownership of all their property, even after marriage. Of course, after these lands were annexed by the United States, these laws changed. But for the early pioneers, unique legal privileges for women existed.
There were relatively few single women in the west during the nineteenth century. Those that did come west often found work in frontier towns. There were few economic opportunities for women in the 1800s, and prostitution, or work as an "upstairs girls" as it was colloquially known, was perhaps the most common career.
Women also found work as teachers. This was one of the only legitimate jobs available to single women. In fact, western territories were the only places in the United States at the time to offer equal pay to female teachers. Most towns, however, refused to employ married teachers, so many teachers only worked up until the time they married.
https://time.com/3662361/women-american-west/