Can a man still annul his wife or daughter's vows?

What role does feminism play in keeping and/or annulling vows? The Torah clearly states that under certain circumstances a father has the right (and perhaps, even the obligation) to annul his daughter's vows, and a husband, his wife's. How does that play into modern times, women empowered, holding top level positions that often surpass those of men?

In biblical times, there most certainly was the concept of a man as the head of a household, one that has undergone a certain level of attrition or erosion. Perhaps in the Ethiopian community one can see some vestige of that approach/philosophy; in the typical village home, the father ate – and was most certainly served, and only thereafter were the children allowed to eat. A certain right or dignity, perhaps a loaded word in its own right, was accorded to him. When the Talmud in Brachot speaks about the time from which a man is allowed to say Shema Yisrael, one of the opinions in the Mishna is when a poor man has eaten his humble bread, and Rashi comments that there isn't a man in Israel, however, poor whose wife doesn't serve him his daily bread. On a similar Mishnaic level, the Gemorah discusses the obligation of a man to his wife and a wife to her husband, and states unequivocally that regardless of how many servants the wife brings into the marriage, she still – for the sake of intimacy and closeness – has to make his bed, and serve him wine, and can not outsource these two activities to the help because they are a fulcrum of a balanced marriage.

My question is then, what do we do nowadays when a husband feels he can exert certain rights in a marriage, when his wife uncategorically knows otherwise? When the husband has all too much skin in the game, i.e., all too much to lose, and pragmatically can not exert rights that his wife all too well thinks are hers and not his, and which society as well no longer feels is vested under the aegis or "dominion" of the man, what relevance then do these Torah dictates have?

I can say for one that yearly, before Rosh Hashanah, as is the custom in Israel, I annul my vows before they take hold – mesirat moda'ah  in Hebrew – and do so as well for my wife, meaning that this issue is utterly irrelevant for me because vows can not take hold unless you explicitly remember them, and decide regardless to contractually obligate yourself in contravention of your initial intent to not give any foothold to vows that you would make over the course of the year.

In what way, then, does this apply? It really is hard to say. Though I think it advisable for everyone to give notice about annulling future vows, I do think that there is a message about annulling vows that we can still glean today, though, humbly, I can aver that I do not know what that message is. Every couple and relationship is different, and modernity has changed gender roles in ways sometimes so extreme that the teachings of the Torah about societal imperatives, norms, and mores seem to have little relevancy.

I do think that the discourse at the time of the bible and Talmud was one much more so of rights, and today, it's more about freedom. For example, the Talmud states that a woman who found an ownerless object, could not lay exclusive claim to it, because it would belong to her husband – and not her – because he had to feed her, and it would breed jealousy for a woman to be able to take possession of lost objects and earn money of her own accord, without the husband receiving recompense because of his contractual obligations to provide for her sustenance. Fascinatingly enough, Rabbi Karelitz Z"L, who served at the helm of one of Israel's top rabbinic courts, argued that the realities of the Talmud have changed, to the betterment of the woman; no longer does a man have a right to a woman's earnings because he agrees to sustain her and provide for her – but rather, if a man and woman file for divorce, and the woman obviously has no desire for her soon to be ex to provide for her, she – the wife – lays exclusive claim to the moneys she earned, and the assets are not split down the middle. Simply put, were the woman to have been the main breadwinner throughout the marriage, the default position, Rabbi Karelitz argued was that the woman lays full control to all of the moneys she added to the marriage, the man left high and dry because she certainly had no intent to give over her hard-earned wages to a man with whom her marriage has no viable horizon for success or future sustainability.