This is an amazing story, totally destroying several of my preconceptions about peasants. The author, while looking at archival data, noticed that in a substantial number of 18th century Russian villages, particularly in the North, a substantial number of young women would not marry. This made no sense in context of the normal peasant survival strategies, in which multi-generational family with several male workers is the best way to maximize the survival of the household. This would, also, be impossible without support from the women's families. The author figured out, based on the available data, that the young women came from Old Believer families and that the reasons for their reluctance to marry were likely religious. He does point out that the religious legitimization meant that young peasant women from such families, unlike Russian orthodox peasant women, could choose whether to marry or not (some, within the same family, did and some did not) and if marry, then to whom. They could do all this with the support of their immediate families. The author points out that, unlike the women, men from the same families almost always married and thus, practically, tried to establish a sustainable household. Finding brides was not easy though, and they had to look way further than was common at the time and spend substantially more money while doing so.