The deformation, stability and vibration equations for anisotropic cylindrical shells stiffened with individual longitudinal and circumferential ribs are derived without introducing the hypothesis of nondeformable normals. The more general assumption adopted for layered materials (for example, glass-reinforced plastics) of a linear variation of the displacements over the thickness of the shell and the height of the ribs is used; in this case for the points of contact of the shell and the ribs after deformation the common normals form broken lines. The solution of the problem of the stability of a cylindrical shell stiffened with circumferential ribs is examined. For a shell with different, arbitrarily located ribs the problem is reduced to a homogeneous algebraic system of equations equal in number to three times the number of ribs.