You think giving fifty-cent blowjobs to the entire high school football team isn’t working outside the home?
And don’t get me started on the train she pulled with the baskeball players at the local college.
In fact, Ann B. Davis was the linchpin of the entire structure of the show. When Sherwood Schwartz was developing the show, he knew it would be a mistake to make both the mother and father dull as dishwater. Someone had to be comic relief, without eroding the authority the parents would need to wrangle a house full of kids while delivering a moral lecture each week.
Schwartz decided that adding a third adult, a maid, would open up story possibilities. He considered a variety of actors and had narrowed it down to a comic relief wife/straight foil maid (Joyce Bulifant and Kathleen Freeman) or a straight foil wife (Florence Henderson) and a comic relief maid. When Ann B. Davis, who had won two Emmy awards, became available to play the maid, Schwartz went with that pair.
Thus, Mrs. Brady was able to lose - and then regain - her singing voice in time for the Christmas pageant and television history was assured.
And without her, how would they have done that tic-tac-toe intro.
Another Sherwood Schwartz trademark was to explain the premise of the show in a one minute theme song at the start of each episode. Same with “Gilliagan’s Island”
Who would win in a fight.
Alice or Mr. French?
The weirdest thing of all was that she had to wear a uniform in her own home, even on weekends.
Um, me?
(Yeah, I had such a crush on Jan when I was, like, eleven. I knew that while all the other guys were after Marsha, my path would be clear … 
)
Marsha, Marsha, MARSHA! Jan was much cuter.
Domestic help attired in uniforms is pretty much par for course in affluent homes, though hardly universal. Some employers think it looks more professional and helps the help blend into the background.
I know quite a few women–some in their 30s and 40s–who have live-in housekeepers and a personal chef/driver. The single ones basically live to shop, may (or may not) volunteer a few hours a week, cruise around the city, socialize over long lunches, shop, gab on the phone, watch soaps, shop and shop.
That said, Mike was an architect, not a CEO, though he might have been a partner.
But Cindy was a porn actress!
Crud. I missed all the good episodes!
Carol was Mike’s beard, and Alice was undeniably more masculine than Mike. Six hours a day, while the kids were at school, Carol and Alice did each other. Had to relieve that tension somehow…
To offer a more serious answer to the OP: In her book, More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave, Ruth Schwartz Cowan demonstrates that various “labor saving devices” introduced over the centuries did little to reduce womens’ overall burden of housework. As tasks became easier, standards changed. For example, a 19th century farmhouse might be considered “clean,” even if there was some dust or grit on the floor. The farmwife only had a broom to clean the floor with, and that was about as good as you could expect. But a 1970s house in a suburban subdivision would not be considered clean if there was dirt on the floor–get out the Electrolux! Housework is never finite. You can always do more.
If a woman like Carol Brady had access to the ultimate “labor-saving device,” a maid, then she could maintain her house at a much higher standard than she would be able to otherwise. So maybe the kitchen floor got washed every day instead of every week. Maybe the sheets got changed twice a week instead of twice a month. Maybe Mike had his undies ironed. Carol could have probably maintained that house at an acceptable standard all by herself, but with Alice’s help, she could achieve something close to domestic perfection.
When I was growing up, two stay-at-home moms in my neighborhood had day maids. One had three children, the other five children.
In college, we wrote a Brady Bunch episode as a Sophoclean tragedy. Alice had divination powers and read the entrails of a meatloaf.
That was after we wrote a Leave it to Beaver episode by Tennessee Williams.
Another data pont: My best friend growing up had a maid. Her mother was a stay-at-home mom, and there were eventually three kids in the family.
-Lil
In the now-forgotten sitcom Best of the West there was a scene where the frontier wife complains that no matter how long or how hard she sweeps, she can never get the floor clean.
Her husband looks down and says “It’s a dirt floor.”
Let me guess–Wally was lusting after Eddie Haskell, who was sleeping with Mrs. Cleaver because Ward was impotent.
It was either having a maid character or introducing an obnoxious cousin character.
Oh, wait…
As a note - not necessarily “maid,” but when growing up both of my parents and my husband had a “nanny.” In all of their cases Nanny was a black woman who came X times a week to help with the house and the children. (All three were raised, during this time, in Virginia - birth years 1944, 1946 and 1958.) From what I can tell, at least in the South, a middle-class family having a “nanny”-type person was pretty much normal.
If they teamed up, they could pound the living shit out of Mr. Belvedere.
Must-see TV.