Women carry power in two forms.
First is the cell line. Males only provide half the code, plus maybe a couple other things. The organelles and main cellular functions are strictly maternal.
"Seven Daughters of Eve."
The second is that they are able to connect families together in a 'covert' manner. It is common for the family name to follow the males. Power connections can be concealed by renaming a daughter's descendants as an acceptable family name.
Thus, the males maintain something of a house for the females to move between. Historically, the nobility would rely heavily on the women for the social networks within and between kingdoms.
Follow the wives. That will show you who is truly connected to whom. Of course… When the women cut a house out of the deals, someone is going to leverage their house to compell that relation be restored… Or eliminate competition.
Americans forgot how to play this game. It also doesn't help that a lot of this "clan" behavior is not entirely public and is only occasionally translated into English.
However… One interesting family has been oddly adamant about translating and publishing their history into wikipedia.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribes_of_Montenegro
You all will have to thank Genbu for her work, when she is willing to step from the shadows. Assuming this is her work - and I don't believe in coincidences.
You'll find those clans incredibly well connected throughout Europe and Russian nobility…. At least until the communist revolutions started killing them all off. We all know the red shields were responsible for that nonsense.
Hence why Genbu likes to stay in the shadows.