For centuries, one small detail from the book of Genesis has carried an outsized weight. Eve, the story goes, was formed from one of Adam’s ribs, and that detail has been used again and again to argue that women are secondary, an afterthought fashioned from something that already existed, rather than a full creation in her own right.
Ribs of an Old Tree asks readers to sit with that story a little longer, and to notice what it actually says. The text does not claim that Adam was complete before the rib was taken. It says he was alone. The rib was not removed because something extra needed to be discarded. It was removed because something necessary was missing, and the garden could not be whole without it.
A rib, after all, is not decoration. A rib protects the heart. Without it, the body cannot survive.
That image runs through every chapter of this book, because it describes something true about the twelve women at its center, and about countless women whose names never made it into any book at all. Behind almost every collapse and every rebuilding in human history, women were doing the quiet architectural work that made survival possible. They carried faith through periods when institutions failed. They preserved culture through war, exile, and famine. They raised children, negotiated peace, managed households and estates, and kept communities intact while the official record credited someone else with holding things together.
Susanna White Winslow lived that reality directly. She crossed the Atlantic while pregnant, gave birth aboard a crowded, freezing ship, and was one of only five adult women to survive the first brutal winter in the Plymouth colony. She buried a husband, remarried, helped raise a blended family, and lived to be roughly one hundred and three years old, long enough to see the small settlement she helped hold together grow into something far larger. History remembers the men who signed the founding documents. It rarely pauses to remember the women who kept those men, and their children, alive long enough to build anything at all.
That is the deeper argument at the heart of Ribs of an Old Tree. The rib was never an afterthought. It was, and remains, the structure that protects what matters most. Women have always been that structure beneath families, faiths, and civilizations, whether or not history chose to say so.
The book closes with a simple reminder to every woman who reads it. You are not a footnote in someone else’s story. You are the rib that protects the heart. You were never secondary, and you never will be.
