In Sweden in 1909 'The phrase "Swedish man" was removed from the application forms to public offices and women are thereby approved as applicants to most public professions'. Now isn't that interesting.
I think the theory behind a lot of property laws that denied the legal personhood of married women was that the married man and woman became one. Of course that one person was the man. All of that was gradually chipped away during the last 300 years with earth shattering breakthroughs like automatic legal majority granted to unmarried women over the age of majority in some places, legal majority granted to married women in others, the right to control your own earnings, the right to dispose of any property you brought into the marriage (in Britain outside of Scotland, the Married Women's Property Act of 1870 gave married women control over their own wages, investments and inheritances -- guess who enjoyed full rights over it all until then?), the right to guardianship of their own children.
Sometimes of course, progress was halting -- married Portuguese women were granted legal majority in 1911 but it was rescinded in 1933. In Spain they were only legal adults from 1931 to 1939. Too bad that thousands of women in both countries then reverted to the status of dependent in one fell swoop.
And further on the theme of old maids and the shame attached -- the number of nuns in Ireland increased x8 in the years 195- to 1900. These are out and out nuns I'm talking about, the ones with the starched wimples and habits, whose families paid a dowry in order to set them up as Brides of Christ. There were lay sisters in the convents too, but they were just skivvies to the Sisters and their uniforms included an apron. They were not dowried Brides, and they were treated like poop. Ireland was unique in Europe in that its pattern of emigration involved huge numbers of single women travelling alone (almost twice as many Irish women as Irish men in the 20th century); the Irish maid in America is caricatured in stories such as Amelia Bedelia. Late marriages out of economic desperation to men more than 20 years older than them accounted for 50% of Irish marriages in the early 20th century.
In Ireland in 1935, Section 16 of the Conditions of Employment Act allowed the Minister of Industry and Commerce to regulate the numbers of women employed in any given industry or field. Guess who got the shaft at a time of high unemployment? Any guesses what the rationale there might have been? Yes, that Mrs meant that married women were selfish to take a job from a man who might need it more than they did. The Civil Service marriage ban was only repealed in 1973. The introduction of free secondary school meant you could send the girls to school as well as the boys [hooray]. Actually, as recently again as some time during my childhood in Ireland, a married women couldn't open a bank account of her own. Whether married or unmarried, Miss or Mrs, a woman in Ireland until not that long ago was either a nuisance who needed to be married off or settled in some other way by her father, or a legal non-person who didn't have a right to deprive a man of a living.
Yes, having those titles in front of your name meant a lot 
. This is the history we celebrate when we choose Mrs or Miss.
When it comes to small gestures like the Miss/Mrs/Ms question, I think this reasoning applies:
'...slow, molecular changes in quantitative relations can at some point transform into decisive qualitative changes, so that the past does indeed look like another country. Historically, the midwife for these enormous transformations has been struggle and mobilisation. These struggles sometimes stop short and often simply force our rulers to reorder the manner of their rule, but they are nonetheless the decisive conjunctures on which historical changes pivot.'
Kieran Allen, Fianna Fail and Irish Labour.