You would get a different answer depending on who you asked.

Take for example Cato the Elder. He was staunchly conservative and strongly believed that Carthage and Greece polluted the pureness of Rome. (He would push for war against the former). He did not like the Hellenistic influences of the latter diluting traditional Roman values.

Within Rome, an influx of booty and wealth poured in to the capital. A consequence of this was that direct taxes for Romans were abolished in 167 BC. There was a feeling that all this wealth and money began to corrupt and rot the Roman elite, as Sallust stated: "wealth and luxury began to undermine earlier standards of public and private conduct."

This money also allowed the upper classes to buy more land, which in turn put local small farmers out of business (Bradley goes into this well). Displaced by slave labour, they drifted into the cities, and by 138 Rome faced an economic crisis.

The lex Claudia of 218 forbade the senatorial class from engaging in commerce, which allowed the equites to collect huge amounts of money. Soon they looked for more political power, which brought them into clashes with the senatorial elite.

There is more, and I would be happy to go into further detail if you want, but my knowledge is pretty limited here. Pamela Bradley is fantastic at covering this period!

I can't give a detailed overview of how expansion affected Roman society as a whole, but I can comment on how it affected gender roles and the place of women in Roman society. Keep in mind, this is all generally speaking- what I say here would not have applied to every Roman woman, and the focus is biased towards the upper class.

Rome was fighting more and more foreign wars, further and further from home, and this meant that Roman men were absent for longer periods of time. Increasingly, they left control of their household and financial affairs to their wives. Women couldn't conduct business themselves- they had to conduct transactions through a male intermediary- but, during this time period, women has increasing control over that intermediary. We see instances of women arranging for the dowries of younger female relatives, and arranging for the purchase and sale of goods.

In Roman marriage, a father gave his daughter to her husband, along with a dowry. Originally, the dowry was a way of transferring basic household goods- furniture, wool, tools, and such. Most Roman marriages were "in manus", meaning that the father passed legal control of the daughter to her husband, and she lost membership in her father's family. However, marriage was becoming more and more of a political tool, especially in the upper class, which was expanding, and getting richer (in addition to money, Rome also saw a massive influx in slave labor as a result of their conquests, meaning that the upper class could grow even more 'upper'). Fathers married their daughters off to people they wanted to have friendly relations with, and massive dowries became more and more common. Laws began to get more detailed regarding divorce and dowries, and precisely how much of the woman's dowry a man had to give back when he divorced her. Fathers wanted to retain control of their daughters and the dowry money that went with them, as well as have the authority to order the marriage to be divorced so they could remarry the daughter if a more advantageous opportunity cropped up (Augustus, though after the time period you specified, exemplifies this: he has his daughter, Julia, keep marrying different guys so her could get a male grandson. It never quite worked out for him). The upshot was a downward trend in "in manus" marriages, and more marriages where the father retained legal control of his daughter. Husbands would be reluctant to spend or invest the dowry money, because they might have to give it back if there was a divorce. This means that there were more and more women who had a a decent amount of money that they could dispose of essentially at will, even if their husband had nominal control over it. Upper-class women exercised increased autonomy, particularly sexual autonomy in the later Republic. A husband might be hard-pressed to divorce his wife if he didn't want to lose her dowry, and a father wouldn't punish a wayward daughter by making her divorce her husband if the match was advantageous to him. The overall trend is of wives drifting out of the control of their husbands. Cato the Elder, being the crotchety old man that he was (note: that is 100% objective fact and in no way a personal opinion), complains:

"To begin with, the woman brought you a big dowry: next she retains a large sum of money which she does not entrust to her husband's control, but she gives it to him as a loan: lastly when she is annoyed with him she orders a "reclaimable slave" to chase him about and pester him for it" (Cato, quoted in Gellius 17.6.8; Gerdner 1986: 72)

Of course, a strongly patriarchal society isn't just going to let women waltz off with a bunch of financial and social power. The Lex Oppia, introduced in 215 BCE as part of a "war austerity" effort, put severe limits on women's jewelry and decorations, and forbade them to ride around in carriages. These limits really have much to do with austerity- they were about limiting the ways that Roman women could express their status and power, independently of their husbands. Valerius, speaking out in favor of repealing the law, directly compared women's cosmetics and adornments to men's status symbols- priesthoods, magistracies, triumphs, military decorations and awards, and war spoils. The law was repealed in 195 BCE after massive women's protests in the streets.

Another law that attempts to further limit women's growing economic sway was the Voconian Law in 169 BCE, which made it illegal for a father from the top property class to make a daughter heir to more than half of his fortune. There was a sense that any woman controlling a larger estate than a man of the same class would be a major violation of the proper order (what I think is important, is that during this time period, the idea of women controlling larger estates than their class peers became an actual possibility, requiring legislative response).

The "ideal" image of a Roman woman at this time was a mother, with sons. She ensured that her sons received a good education, she dressed conservatively and with no ornamentation, she used any financial or social clout she had exclusively for the benefit of her sons and husband (not herself), and she displayed little outward emotional bond towards them- for instance, Cornelia Africana, the mother of the two Roman statesmen called the Gracchi, and who was idealized both during her life and after her death as the perfect woman, was praised for (supposedly) not shedding a single tear at her son's deaths, instead being proud that her sons had died serving the state (one was beaten to death in the streets with a bench by the Senate for daring to suggest reforms to help the poor). You can see how this idealized image, promoted by a patriarchal society, was, in part, a reaction to the increasing independence and autonomy of women. If a woman wanted to live up to society's ideals, she would conveniently not use any money she might have for herself, instead only using it for the benefit of her sons.

Of course, we haven't any real clue how many women lived up to this ideal, how wide-spread the problems Cato whined about were (especially outside of the upper class), and how much autonomy any given woman really could exercise. All we have are broad trends.

Speaking of broad trends, for the Roman Empire as a whole during this time period, we see an increase in wealth and cheap labor, spurring economic growth, social change (as partially detailed above), and, eventually, a massive gap between the rich and the poor. There was also a lot of change in the political scene, as the organizational infrastructure required to support extended campaigns and manage an increasingly large population grew into place.

There's a lot more to be said regarding on this topic. I've offered my little area of knowledge above.

Sources:

Women in the Classical World, Fantham, Foley, et al. (NY Oxford, 1994)

SPQR, Mary Beard