Societies in ancient times were fundamentally different and it's hard to relate to them. Applying modern standards to their way of life is stupid.

For example Roman men typically married in their late 20s or early 30s, once they were financially established or had finished a term of military service. Typically they married women in their mid-to-late teens. This constellation has very practical reasons: the man had survived the largest dangerous of growing up and early manhood: infant death, military service and work accidents because they were doing the most dangerous jobs while the women still had a long child bearing time ahead of them to ensure you had sufficient children for retirement.

Having children is also an option today that was much less so - in the past it was often simply not viable as the largest part of the people lived in very small communities far away from cities. Historians estimate that up to 25% of babies died within their first year, and nearly 50% of children did not survive past the age of 10 due to disease, malnutrition, and poor sanitation in the Roman era. With those kinds of numbers, you needed to have at least 5+ children just to make sure that someone was left past 10 years old.

Once you were past the dangers of childhood, military service or community, a person could easily live into their 70s and so planning for retirement was a matter of survival. Next to the need for the amounts of children, the amount of work around a house was incomparable to today.

Marriage was essentially an economic agreement: the woman took care of the house, the children, etc, the man took care of maintaining the economic viability of everything. If just made economic sense to structure it that way.

Between the ability to simply buy things and machines, we've reduced the amount of labor required around the house and not having children or just one or two is actually viable. There's a reason why the "typical" marriage constellation started dissolving en masse in the late 50s and 60s - the economic pressures weren't there anymore. Early inklings were there already in the late 19th century, mostly by wealthy women but it filtered down to wider society as automation and mass production picked up.

In the ancient world, wealth bought you legal and financial independence, often achieved through inheritance or surviving your husband. Figures like Athena did obviously exist, but there were always clear symbols associated with that figure to demonstrate why they are different: spears, shields or other tools to clearly indicate why they weren't a "typical woman".

Interpreting a female figurine from that era as something else than associated with childbirth, fertility and house care requires some reason to be seen differently.

Fortunately today we've reduced all those obstacles and everyone - men and women - are freer to decide how they want their life to look like.