Life & Mortality Quote by Gloria Steinem

Steinem’s line lands like a well-aimed heckle at the moral economy of “be good now, get paid later.” Calling it a “con job” doesn’t just reject religious reward narratives; it frames them as a transaction engineered to keep people compliant. The genius is the casual, almost amused “when you think about it,” as if the scam is hiding in plain sight and only requires the tiniest nudge of scrutiny to collapse.

Her corporate comparison is the surgical move. Corporations are already cultural shorthand for calculated incentives and cynically optimized behavior, yet even they don’t dare promise benefits after you’re dead. That joke carries venom: if the most profit-driven institutions know posthumous rewards are useless as compensation, why are humans expected to accept them as justice? Steinem is exposing a power dynamic: the deferred payout works best on the powerless, because the cost is immediate (obedience, silence, sacrifice) and the accountability is conveniently unreachable.

Context matters. As a feminist activist shaped by mid-century America, Steinem is pushing against institutions that historically policed women’s bodies and ambitions with sanctified patience: endure, submit, wait. The afterlife “reward system” becomes a critique of how hierarchy launders itself as virtue. The subtext isn’t just atheism; it’s labor politics, gender politics, and a demand for ethics that can be audited in the present tense. If your promised liberation can’t be collected while you’re alive, Steinem suggests, it’s not salvation - it’s management.