What happened was that the medical officer associated with the space program decided to see if women would be comparable to men in handling the rigours of space travel. This became an issue because NASA at the time needed to save every ounce of weight in the payload, because their first rockets were not that powerful. If a woman astronaut could replace a man, she'd be lighter. It was as simple as that. They tracked down an experienced (but still young) female pilot, and put her through the same tests that the male prospective astronauts had gone through, and she shone. In fact, her endurance and ability to deal with isolation were superior to the men. Plans to test a wider female cohort were put in place, and a dozen other women pilots went through the physical testing.
But then NASA pulled the plug. They didn't need any female astronauts after all; they had plenty of qualified blokes already; their rockets were more powerful now, so the weight factor no longer mattered. The women, who'd had their hopes raised, were cast aside.
Even though they didn't make it into space (except for Wally Funk, who flew on the New Shepard spacecraft in 2021 at the age of 82), these women were remarkable, battling a super-sexist industry to work as pilots. (Even in the 1970s, I don't remember encountering a single female pilot in all my father's years flying in PNG, and I well remember Debbie Wardley's fight to fly for Ansett in 1980.) But if the aviation world was sexist, the space industry was ten times more so. There was just no way that NASA was going to allow any little lady to steal thunder from their big strong brave hyper-masculine jet pilot astronauts. In many ways this is a sad story, but it's also a fascinating.
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