Ordination of Women
In the 1980s Carnley supported the ordination of women and on 7 March 1992, he ordained the first women priests in the Anglican Church of Australia in St George's Cathedral, Perth. His sermon on the occasion took as its reference an autobiographical piece by Charlotte Perkins Gilman entitled The Yellow Wallpaper. Carnley used Gilman's account of the self-destruction consequent on a "benignly prescribed, submissive, middle-class role" demanded of women in the 19th century to consider the "implications of the philosophy that women should "stay in their place, maintaining silence, concealing problems and repressing creativity". The yellow wallpaper of the title is what the imprisoned protagonist in Gilman's story peels off the walls as she goes mad. Carnley used it as a metaphor for the situation of the women who had been waiting to be allowed to become priests, saying: "Today, we are peeling away the sickly yellow, faded, silverfish-ridden wallpaper with which the church has surrounded itself and imprisoned women for centuries past in its benign and perhaps well-meaning determination to confine them by role."
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