Years before NASA's first manned space flight, a band of women trained secretly in the desert to become America's first female astronauts. Yet it was more than 20 years before the first American women made it into space. The Mercury 13 were summarily dismissed as viable candidates by the boys' club at NASA and on Capitol Hill, despite passing the same battery of tests that selected the Mercury 7 astronauts.
This summary is courtesy of McNaughton Books