Conventional views on marriage migration consider itprimarily family-related, an portray female
marriage migrants as mostly passive, tied movers. Marriage as an economic strategy is seldom studied.
We argue that a structural framework enables analysis of the complexities underlying female
marriage migration, stressing institutional, economic, and sociocultural factors that impose constraints
on and provide opportunities for women's mobility. A review of the historical and social
roles of marriage in China shows that its transactionalture undermines women's status but offers
disadvantaged women an opportunity to achieve social and economic mobility. Based on statistical
analyses of a one-percent sample of China's 1990 Census, we show that peasant women in poor
areas are constrained by their institutional positions, rural origins, and low education and status,
shutting them out from cities and the urban labor market. Yet in the face of these constraints, many
women, in exchange for economic opportunities and agricultural work, pursue migration by
marrying into rural areas in more developed regions and by moving over long distances. These rural
brides in well-defined migration streams are testimony to the roles of social and kinship networks
and of brokers in the marriage market. Men who are socially and/or economically disadvantaged
but locationally privileged are able to draw brides from afar. Despite the neoclassical overtone of
the notion that marriage migration is an economic strategy, weargue that a structural approach is
necessary for understanding thecomplexities underlying female migration ad for explaining the
recent phenomenonf long-distance female marriage migration in China. Key Words: China,
marriage, migration, women