I have a rather tilted view of antiquity because my area of study is Dutch New York. The Dutch built a culture here that wasn't primitive at all. When they placed orders for goods to be brought by ship, they contracted that the ballast in the ship was good Dutch brick for building their houses. Read the inventories of New Amsterdam and it's filled with precious metals and finely crafted furniture.
There was more an expectation of education for women, even if they didn't go out and work professionally. They worked in the shops and, even if well to do with servants, worked alongside their servants. It wasn't a culture that encouraged laziness in anyone. The attitudes you read about are shocking in their modernness in a period you think about as culturally impoverished.
A cousin of the Schuylers, brought to America by her father, wrote a fascinating book from the point of view of a child not quite accepted within that society.
Memoirs of an American Lady
The children were separated into groups that competed against one another, but the groups were chosen so that close blood relationships were unlikely to form new romantic ones. She wasn't made a member of the groups, as someone who wouldn't marry into them. Slavery was also different in Dutch society. Perhaps because it wasn't about large plantations, there were far fewer slaves and the relationships were different. A wealthy child was given a slave at birth, and they were raised together in the same crib, and educated together. When a young man went off to earn his living, it was a dangerous endeavor because the best fortunes were in the wilds of fur trapping. The young man and the slave he was raised with left together and there were as many stories of one bringing back the injured partner as the other way around.
NOT to say anything in favor of slavery, of course. It's just that the viciousness you hear about in stories of the south and of the really primitive west were not the norm in the old Dutch NY stories. The earliest anti-slavery societies that I saw forming there were around 1800.
The book I'd recommend strongly was Anne McVicar Grant's book, "Memoirs of an American Lady" which is about Margareta Schuyler, Madame Schuyler, the daughter of John Schuyler and wife of John's brother Peter's son Philip. So much for the effectiveness of childhood groups to prevent close marriages.
The Schuylers were deeply tied into the local Indians, with the women learning the Indian language, and the barn kept open for traveling Indians to spend the night under shelter. When treaty negotiations were going on, the Indians asked for Peter Schuyler to be part of the talks.
Anne married James Grant, a minister, and accompanied him to his Highland parish of Laggan in 1779, where she published extensively. Her husband's health wasn't good and her financial position precarious. Sir Walter Scott, among others, petitioned the king for a pension for her of 50 lbs a year.
The Dutch culture I'm describing fell apart as it was assimilated into the more successful British Episcopalian world of New York.