Next event is GUARDED at annieglass, October 24, 2 pm. Learn more
Friedman brings to life a generation of women whose stories were rarely told—intensely physical, exhilarating, and deeply human.
GUARDED
Women, Water, and Saving Lives
GUARDED takes readers inside the hidden world of California’s first women ocean lifeguards.
Every beach was run by men who claimed the biggest surf and the gnarliest conditions. Women were met with raised eyebrows: Can she cut it here?
On a cold, foggy morning in 1978, eighteen-year-old Debbie Friedman stood in the sand at Huntington Beach with one hundred men. The starting gun fired. She charged into the surf—and into a new life.
You’ll never look at lifeguarding the same way again.
Debbie Friedman was one of the first women hired as an ocean lifeguard in California, starting in 1978 at San Clemente and Huntington State Beaches. When Friedman could find no stories about her generation of first women lifeguards, she wrote this book to share a few.
“In 1978, Debbie Friedman showed up at Huntington Beach for a tryout to be an ocean lifeguard for the State of California. Looking around, she realized she was the only woman, surrounded by a hundred men. But she could swim fast, and thus began the life she describes so beautifully. This woman can write! I couldn’t put it down.”
“An immersive, unexpected account of a demanding profession where lives were on the line—shaped by the realities of swimming through surf to save lives.”
Sally Tuttle, Pt. Mugu, 1975