Mike Brady was an architect on The Brady Bunch. Alice, the live-in maid, took care of the cooking and cleaning. So what the heck did Carol Brady do all day? “I begged for a job, because I’ve been a working mother. I have four children,” actress Florence Henderson told the HuffPost Show in 2015. “(But they said) No, you can’t.”
It wasn’t just that Henderson wanted more interesting things for her character to do (though a job would have accomplished just that). She worried the audience would despise Carol for being a spoiled brat. “You know, she’s got Alice. People are going to hate her,” Henderson told ABC News for a special called Best in TV. “I worked all my life. And through all pregnancies. (The network) wouldn’t do it.”
“I mean, I did needlepoint,” Henderson griped. “I helped Alice prepare food. But I guess they wanted me to be the perfect wife and mother.”
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That’s the only explanation. Carol even had a degree from the generically named State University, for Pete’s sake. Beyond the needlepoint, the show’s writers occasionally tried to come up with things for Carol to do. She was a member of the PTA and a “women’s club,” though not the kind, apparently, that was working to pass the Equal Rights Amendment. She chaired a drive to save Woodland Park.
But the closest she came to a job-job was in the second season episode, “Tell It Like It Is.” She’s gunning for a gig as a freelance writer at Tomorrow’s Woman magazine, penning a story about her unusual blended family. Carol takes a gloves-off, tell-it-like-it-is approach, but her story is rejected for being “too sensational.” When she whitewashes the story to make her family seem more bland, she gets a paycheck! (The magazine editors show up for a photo shoot and determine that the family is chaotic after all and revert to the first draft.)
Carol has become a working woman after all. Except that because The Brady Bunch was that kind of sitcom, her new career is forgotten by the next episode, in which L.A. Rams star Deacon Jones convinces Peter he can be on the football team and in the glee club.
That should have been that, except the enduring popularity of The Brady Bunch meant producers kept rebooting the show (The Brady Bunch Variety Hour, The Brady Brides, The Bradys et al). Now, Henderson had some leverage. “When we started having all of the reunions, I said, ‘I will not come back unless you give me a job,’” she told HuffPost. “So you know what they made me? Screw them! A real estate agent!”
At least she could work from home and help Alice hand out sack lunches.
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