Family networks and women's networks were coordinated strategies for the survival and advancement of the family. Constructed over the life-cycle, these networks originated with the work of parents, godparents, siblings, and other family members as they sought to strategically position the child for advantageous marriage, career, increased status, and wealth. As a child aged and was increasingly able to form their own networks, their connections expanded beyond the household, to bonds of neighborhood and the wider family group. In adolescence these networks began to reveal a gendered aspect that reflected activities and roles that girls and boys performed in adolescence and young adulthood. Ultimately, networks aligned with patriarchal norms: a family's network was usually masculine in orientation and was augmented and maintained in relationships formed in public, as a courtier, soldier, lawyer, or officeholder. All members of the family group participated in cultivating and maintaining their larger kinship and social networks, but ultimately those networks were determined by the male head of a family or kinship group. Women's networks were matriarchal in orientation and were formed mainly from ties within the household or connected to women's roles and careers. These matriarchal networks reflected the position of powerful noblewomen and gentlewomen at the center of the group and the hierarchical organization of their patrons and their clients. The two types of networks overlapped but did not replicate each other; some of the same people appear in both family networks and women's networks but the two formed and operated in their own distinct ways.