The Babadook (2014) punctures this myth of the new feminized laborer - a perky, independent professional, free from housewifery and inequality. This figure represents a new era of gendered terror, one in which the unhappy housewife is replaced with the modern affective care worker, a woman who is perpetually frazzled and stretched too thin over her personal and public lives, but must assume the guise of relentless cheer and sympathy. Although Flo represents a brave new feminist world, her affect is of a post-op Stepford Wife, cheerful and service-oriented to the bone (or wiring). Here, the company’s ubiquitous spokeswoman, Flo, appears in housewife drag and faces off against a fifties-styled salesman who appeals to a traditionally gendered household in which the man does “the hard work of making money” while the woman gets all the savings “her little heart desires.” Instead, the ad asserts, women can both make money and consume, and moreover, all that talk of inequality is so retro. She has finally and definitively transcended the subordinate position of the housewife, as we see in a supposedly feminist satirical ad for Progressive Insurance. This namelessness has now been replaced with the relentless positivity of today’s working woman, with her many euphemistically titled roles. In 1963 Betty Friedan diagnosed the frustration and depression of the housewife as “the problem with no name.” The cure to this problem, she argued, was women’s entrance into waged work and careers on equal footing with men while still being allowed a fulfilling life as wife and mother.
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