Politics & Power Quote by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

New York, in Gilman's framing, isn’t the promised land of belonging; it’s a factory for displacement. “Everyone is an exile” flips the city’s immigrant myth into something colder: a place where identity is always provisional, where you’re perpetually translating yourself to survive. The sting lands in the second clause: “none more so than the Americans.” Gilman turns the dominant group into the most unmoored, implying that in the modern metropolis, even “natives” become strangers to their own country.

The line works because it weaponizes a familiar narrative. Exile is supposed to be the immigrant’s condition, the consequence of leaving home. Gilman suggests exile can also be the consequence of arriving at “home” and finding it unrecognizable. New York becomes America’s accelerant: money, speed, crowds, anonymity. The very forces that make it exciting also dissolve stable cultural footing. If you’re American in New York, you’re not reassured by national belonging; you’re confronted with a city that is more global than national, more future than past, and impatient with inherited certainties.

Context matters: Gilman wrote as an acute critic of American social arrangements, especially the way modern life reorganized work, gender, and domesticity. Read through that lens, “Americans” aren’t just citizens; they’re the people who assumed the country had a coherent center. New York, for Gilman, exposes the lie. The capital of reinvention also makes reinvention mandatory, and that mandate exiles everyone.