What were the roles of the ancient women?
Pretty much the same as today. Cooking, cleaning, watching the children, making clothes, laundry, dishes, bearing children, and teaching her girls how to cook and clean.
That was just the wives. Women existed who were professial party-goers, entertaining rich men and their 'needs'. They satisfied the love side of a man's life, the wife would be there to keep his household.
I would disagree. First, we need to know what the writer meant by 'ancient women'. Time period and geographical location is critical to a good answer. Women have been members of armies all over the world. Women have been rulers and merchants and shopkeepers throughout history. Women have also been slaves, concubines and wives. The role of a man or a woman is very dependent on the specific culture and time period under discussion.
It depended greatly on where the women were from. For example, in Ancient Egypt women had rights above and beyond those of women even in the 1900's. they had the right to legally divorce their husbands, and contest divorce in court, as well as the right to inherit property and own there own business. In Roman Pompeii, frescoes indicate that women had a large role in the family businesses, keeping the books and dealing with customers.
I like both of the answers above, but I think it's a matter of prevalence. First, let's define the "ancient world" as anything before 450 CE or so and the fall of the western Roman Empire. I recognize that this is somewhat arbitrary, but I think it's as good as any, even if it is Eurocentric.
In all times before the present in industrialized countries, the vast majority of people were rural, and lived and worked on farms. So, the vast majority of women had lives that were very similar to each other. And one thing ties them together: the spindle and the distaff. These were so symbolic of women and their work that we sometimes use the word "distaff" today when referring to the maternal side of a family. The Hittites had a magic ritual for curing impotence. The magician (usually a woman referred to by the literal term "old woman," but probably meaning a sort of witch/midwife) would give a man a spindle and a distaff and dress him in women's clothes. Then, she would take away the spindle and distaff and give the man a bow and spear, telling him he had now reentered the world of men.
So, the lot of women almost everywhere was to make thread and, ultimately, cloth. Making cloth was an ongoing chore that was practiced whenever a woman's hands weren't doing something else. It was typical in most farming communities for the women to gather in a central place, sharing child-watching, while making thread and, on occasion, collaborating on a loom to make cloth.
Certainly, the Egyptians had manufacturers who used male labor, but both male and female skeletons have been found with the bones deformed and flattened under the knee by working long hours on the horizontal, Egyptian loom.
Clearly, there were other occupations. Priestess, prostitute, priestess/prostitute, queen, business partner (there is a wonderful tablet from an Anatolian, Assyrian trader circa 1850 BCE to his wife in Assyria telling her to send him a certain kind of textile that is most popular with the Anatolians), retter, cook, bath slave, house slave, wetnurse, nanny, etc.
But the lot of most women was child rearing, light farm chores, and making cloth.
The roles of women were to do the more skillful and simpler tasks; and bear children while the men did the more labor some tasks and provide food.
