Guarded: Women, Water, and Saving Lives

By Debbie Friedman

GUARDED takes readers inside the hidden world of California's first women ocean lifeguards.

In the late 1970s, 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.

What followed was immersion into a fiercely competitive, insular beach culture shaped by life-and-death consequences and entrenched ideas about who belonged. As one of the first women hired, Friedman stepped into a lifeguard world that did not include women.

Blending personal narrative with the rarely told stories of other women who entered the profession, GUARDED captures a pivotal era on the California coast-intensely physical, funny, exhilarating, and deeply human.

You'll never look at lifeguarding the same way again.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0GKLWJ4KL
• ISBN13: 9798993766409
• Release Date: January 2026
• Publisher: Tower One Press
• Length: 264 Pages
• Weight: 0.68 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.5" x 8.5"