Traditions of Karelian maternity rituals are widely represented in the ethnographic historical science literature. At the same time motherhood as an institution and as a social and cultural status deserves special consideration. The paper is aimed at describing the development of the motherhood within Karelia in historical dynamics, as well representing the social and cultural status of the mother and the changes in the strategy of reproductive behavior in the Karelian village. The events presented in the paper refer to the period of the late XIX — early XX c. It was a time of economic, social and cultural reforms in Russian society, which had some specific repercussions on the empire borderlands. The paper uses a large number of recently published and unpublished ethnographic and historical sources, dialect vocabulary data, some of the author’s field materials and scientific works on the topic. The author adheres to the principles of gender history proposed by J. Scott, which involves the analysis of cultural symbols, normative prescriptions and social institutions and life stories of individual women. The author comes to the following conclusions. 1. Marriage and the maternity increased the social prestige of the peasant women, because they realized her main purpose. 2. The gender of the child had a different meaning for the male and female part of the peasant family collectives. If considering the patrilocal line of inheritance, preference was given to the birth of a boy. At the same time, the Karelian language data indicate a higher status of the mother after the birth of the girl. 3. There was a change in reproductive behavior in the North Karelian families in the second half of the XIX c. towards to reducing the number of children in the family to two or five. The reasons for such transformation were the growth in the importance of non-agricultural earnings, and the border position of the region (the cross-border marriages), which changed the customary cultural norms. 4. Some elements of modernization were not perceived by Karelian women. They continued to apply to rural midwives despite the growth of the network of obstetric care, and they also preferred the bathhouse or barn as a place for childbirth instead of medical institutions.
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