Keeping our discussion to Spain, women have been able to manage their own assets for a long time (including married woman). Let's not project english law onto the whole world.
It also takes generations for the rights to fully take effect, for example women being refused services by sexist men or hitting glass ceilings at work.
Even in the US, I can see very different changes in the treatment and expectations of my older women cousins who grew up in the 1980s and 1990s versus those who grew up in the 2000s and 2010s.
Same laws, but the rate of change from those laws accelerated as older generations died out and critical mass in the population with the new views takes hold.
Women only recently got the right to manage their own assets, and in some societies it is still in the process of happening.
>and their families,
Yes, they used to work for their families.