‘I’m going to let rip … I’m knackered.’’ Thus did the Tory MP Nadine Dorries out herself at 58 as a member of what some are calling the wronged generation. We’re arguably all knackered, of course. Small children traipse yawning to school, hollow-eyed mothers down double espressos at their desks, commuters pass out on the sofas in front of the News at Ten while their office cleaners work two jobs back-to-back just to make ends meet. “Tired all the time” is such a common if medically vague complaint that GPs know it by the acronym TATT.

That’s precisely why so many dream of the day when we can make it all stop; put our feet up, enjoy life. But to their fury, thousands of women around Dorries’s age are now discovering that day is infinitely further away.

On Wednesday, parliament once again debated the single biggest austerity measure you’ve probably never heard of, unless you’re a woman in your mid-fifties to early sixties: George Osborne’s decision back in 2011 to fast-forward the hitherto long, slow process of equalising the state pension age at 66 for both men and women. That milestone will now be reached by 2020, not 2026, which sounds like a boringly minor technical tweak until you realise it saves the state £30bn.

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And all achieved with miraculously little fuss, partly because knackered older women are not as exciting to the media as, say, Helen Mirren in a bikini, and partly because many older women didn’t even notice their retirement dates were being pushed further and further back. (Many say they never got official letters warning of the changes and still assumed they were retiring at 60; confusingly, retirement ages for women born between 1953-60 can now be anywhere between 62 and 66, depending on your birthday).

Well, they’re noticing now. And many are reacting much as marathon runners would if some fit young organiser blithely decided to add a few miles to the route just as they were hobbling painfully to the finishing line.

Clearly, something has to give in a state pension system never designed for 21st-century life expectancy. Living longer inevitably means working longer too. But that’s no help to older women who can’t just grit their teeth and work longer as a result of Osborne’s measure, because they’re not even working now: women made redundant late in their fifties, who can’t persuade employers that they’re not past it; women who are sick, or caring for sick partners, or who retired early thinking they could live off their savings for a bit and now realise the money won’t stretch until the pension comes in.

The campaign group Women Against State Pension Age Inequality (Waspi) says it’s heard of older women so desperate that they’re relying on neighbours for food. It’s not asking for a return to retiring at 60, but help for those who didn’t realise what was happening until it was too late.

These women come from a generation who grew up being told that asking for equal pay was selfish

Barbara, Linda, Christine. The names of affected constituents reeled off by MPs during the debate sounded reassuringly old-fashioned, cosy even. But there’s nothing cosy about the stories they tell: factory workers in bed exhausted at 7.30pm; grandmothers guilty about leaving their working daughters in the lurch because they won’t be free to do the childcare after all; precious time supposed to be shared with frail older spouses snatched away. The pensions minister Baroness Altmann has received hate mail; some seemingly can’t forgive her for having been sympathetic to the Waspi issue before entering government, only to toe the official line now that it’s too late to change anything.

What really enrages the Waspi women, however, is being piously told that this is what equality looks like; that they can’t demand parity with men when it suits them but expect special favours when it doesn’t. Aren’t there record numbers of women in work now; a 68-year-old woman running for president of America?

Yet all that is light years from the life experience of many Waspi women who saw little equality in their own working lives and bitterly resent the implication that now it’s payback time for a feminist windfall they never received.

The Barbaras and Lindas come from a generation who grew up being told that asking for equal pay was selfish, because it might cost husbands and fathers their jobs; who could still quite easily be sacked for getting pregnant. They earned and saved less than men but were raised with the assumption that if you looked after your family, you’d be looked after in return. Now if they’re still working long into retirement, it’s probably because they can’t afford to stop, not because they fancy a crack at the White House.

Not every fifties woman feels the same, obviously; some love their jobs and want to work until they drop, including several of those MPs speaking in Wednesday’s debate. This can be an awkward subject for ambitious older women, reluctant to give any more credence to the ageist belief that all sixtysomethings are secretly longing to throw in the towel.

But it shouldn’t be difficult to understand that what appeals to a healthy, ambitious, professionally fulfilled older man or woman isn’t necessarily the same for someone trapped in a job they’ve always hated and whose knees are going. Rupert Murdoch is running a global empire at 84 but we don’t assume all men should be obliged to follow suit, any more than we think that because some people become forgetful or slow as they grow older, everyone over 55 needs sacking. Age is a rotten yardstick for judging when it’s time to stop. But since it’s the only yardstick the state really has for deciding whose retirement to support and whose to delay, the Waspis are a cautionary tale for all of us, male or female.

Many economists would say even 66 is too young to retire; that the state pension age should be closer to 70. But the higher it rises, the wider the gap down which anyone could fall if they’re unlucky enough. And that’s the gap between when the state grudgingly accepts we can stop work and when illness, redundancy or family circumstances force us to do so; the gap between expectation of old age and reality. The Waspi cause is an angry buzz in the ear of politicians now. One day it may be a roar.