Homicides committed by women in Montenegrin past and present

Women are the perpetrators of the crime of murder, both in the past and in contemporary society. New scientific knowledge is most often used in order to look at the contemporary patterns of behavior of female that led to the commission of the criminal act of murder. However, criminal history allows us to use this knowledge to understand one segment of the illicit behavior of women in the past. Accordingly, in this paper, through a feminist prism, we investigate certain aspects of female murders and show the patriarchal conditions that influenced wives, mothers, and daughters-in-law to become murderers. The primary source for researching female murderers in the Montenegrin past is the archive material of the Great Court as the supreme judicial instance. This material provides data on the basis of which it will be reconstructed who the victims of the female murderer were, what her motives were, and what life situations were like in patriarchal society prior to the execution of the murder. This historical part of the study serves to provide a better understanding of the ways of adult female killers in contemporary Montenegrin society, which is still characterized as patriarchal when it comes to some segments of the lives of contemporary Montenegrin women.