A wedding need not move a bride into her husband's home. In one widespread regional custom, the bride left her husband soon after the ceremony and went back to live with her parents for at least three more years. She visited him only on a few festival days each year.
Taking a vow to stay single was a deliberate rejection of the claims and obligations that marriage placed on a woman. Unlike marriage, sworn spinsterhood carried no such ascribed duties. That made it a real alternative path rather than simply a failure to marry.
The delayed-move form of marriage was the normal, dominant form in a rich silk-producing district and in the rice-growing areas next to it. The book connects the custom to the local economy and studies how economic change altered it. Where daughters' work was valuable, keeping them home longer had a material basis.