 The example is of interest to feminists in the first place because the deference and apparent preference for subservience it describes is gendered. It is an outcome of systems of gender oppression that women are expected to assume servile roles, and hence may come to endorse, prefer or willingly adopt them. Moreover, perhaps precisely because of the connection between these kinds of preferences and systems of gender oppression, many feminists resist the conclusion that the Angel and the Deferential Wife are autonomous. Thus Susan Babbitt argues that although the Deferential Wife appears to have made a rational judgment about what she values, and appears therefore to be living according to her own life-plans, in fact the preference for subservience is incompatible with her autonomy: “habitual servility” defines her sense of self, and this is “not the kind of self to which a concept of autonomy can be applied” (Babbitt 1993, 250). If this is right, influential accounts of autonomy, and those feminist positions influenced by them, will have to be revised. (See the entry on “Feminist Moral Psychology” for more discussion of the example of the Deferential Wife.)