Great story idea but don't know if I should continue writing so I need help

You can't copyright a society model, so don't worry about it.

 

The closest stories to that concept that I know of are in Ursula K. Leguin's Ekumen cycle, and they don't necessarily have complete gender equality in them. They play a lot with the concept of what is and isn't gender equality, and with gender itself, but they don't necessarily say everyone's equal. Some of the societies in those stories approach equality, some are completely unequal, and often, how equal they are or aren't is in the eye of the beholder.

But the idea isn't copyright. You can certainly take it and run with it.

Plenty of actual cultures have been built on that very concept. But then, again, the question can be raised as to how equal that really was.

 

Makes me wonder how often the genders see each other. What if they spent much of their time cloistered away from each other. Maybe they speak different languages.
The best thing is to just start writing stuff. maybe do some monologues from different characters just to feel out ideas of day-to-day things they would experience.

 

>both genders

Well your society is going to have to have some sort of global culture that colonizes others and erases gender variance by force. There can be something interesting there, especially if your story focuses on noncisheteronormative characters fighting this system, but it has to be handled with care.

You cannot copyright a trope or type of story. The omegaverse/abo lawsuit didn't go anywhere in court because it was tropes. If you could, then DC and Marvel would have ended the other in court. You can write a story about an orphan boy going to a magic boarding school and that's totally legal. But if you write a story about a space wizard named Hari Podder who fights space wizard hitler, well, good luck with that. Generally the things that are copyrighted are the proper nouns: Pokemon, Pikachu, The Wizarding World. You can't write a story about Pikachu, but you can write a story about kids collecting and battling monsters. You're more likely to run afoul of the copyright of a song or poem by including some lines in your text than you ever would for "stealing an idea."

 

If you want to avoid lawsuits then it might be best if you don't know. If you can legally say that you've never read X or even heard of it then it helps show that any similarity is just a coincidence.

 

I have to express my dubiousness about a truly equal society where one gender would have political power over the other. Using the real world as an example, most governments are run by men, so women are less than equal. The same would probably be true if women ruled everything, even if it didn't start out that way. People tend to want to make things better for those like them, and would create policies that eventually would alienate the opposite gender. A perfect world is obviously impossible, you are dealing with people here, but you can remove some of the gender-bias if you delineated the governance as well... Perhaps 12 ministers covering the various facets of society, 6 males and 6 females. That way, you draw the lines as to what power they do have and what they have to defer to their opposites.

For me, these lines would depend on how you want society to run. If you want a militaristic regime, then have men run the military, but if you would rather have a strong defensive strategy, then have a woman do the job. Obviously this system isn't perfect because people are people and you might get an aggressive, militaristic woman in charge or a restrained, defense-oriented man.

Perhaps it could even shift back and forth with each election; but the one thing that must always be true; there is to be 6 female ministers and 6 male ones.

 

The Alethi society in the Stormlight Archive (Brandon Sanderson) is very close to this. In this society, men are the leaders and warriors, while women are the scholars and artists, and it is actually shameful for men to be able to read.

 

The Stormlight Archive is similar, but not the same. I would say the biggest difference is that in the Stormlight Archive, most power lays with the men, while in your idea, most power lays with women. They are similar in the idea that men are warriors/workers and women are scholars/caretakers, but the execution of both ideas seems to be different.

Having said that, if this is what you want to do, I say go for it! There are thousands of novels replicating feudal society, so why wouldn't there be multiple novels with a gender power-division like this? I'm sure the stories will be plenty different, so don't let a similar idea stop you. If you think about it, very few ideas are original (take, as an example, elemental magic, chosen ones, or even time-travel), but the way you give your own voice to those ideas is what will set your story apart.

 

There was an Ancient Greek play called the Assemblywoman which had a similar concept. So it’s an old idea that’s been used and tweaked through the centuries. Don’t worry about it being a rip-off.

The main thing I want to point-out is that you didn’t pitch a story idea. Stories tend to have characters with motivations and goals.
You pitched one aspect of a setting and settings are rarely interesting. Get a good story attached to a shallow, derivative setting and no one will care about the setting being a rip-off or whatever.

Also, I guess I’ll point-out that “equal” is kind of a weirdly vague term and probably not the best way to start worldbuilding. Like, say I were to divide society into two equal spheres: public and private. Now let’s say I give men the public sphere: they’re the political officials, businessmen, law enforcement, etc.
Now, in the interest of equality, I give women the private sphere. They run the household, raise the children (which basically give women control of the most valuable thing in any society: the next generation) and are excluded from risking their safety in war or the workforce.
Oops - it looks like while setting-up an “divided but equal” society, I accidentally made a patriarchy.
I think that if you want women to be the upper class - if that works better for your story - you should just ditch the “equality” angle and make a setting that works for the narrative.

 

Here's the real question: which gender has primary control over distribution of food?

According to my anthropology professor back in college, that's the way societies determine which gender is in charge, so to speak. If it's a primarily hunting society, and men are the hunters, it's going to be patriarchal to some degree. If it's agricultural and women own the land, the women are going to have a lot more say and sway. If money is the primary resource that obtains food, whichever gender is the primary breadwinner will have more say. He/she who has the gold makes the rules.

 

He might obtain his power through women. Maybe he's the son of a queen, or her nephew through her sister. Maybe he can only become king by marrying the hereditary queen. This could be a society where women hold the titles and men can only receive them through the women.

Some Celtic tribes did it exactly that way. The Picts, for example. One well researched theory about King Arthur is that marriage to Guinevere was what got him recognized as high king. She was a Pictish queen, and her people only recognized kings by virtue of the queen. Meanwhile, some of the other tribes in Britain at the time were more patriarchal and recognized kings in the more usual way. That marriage unified those tribes with the Picts.

The Welsh story of Lleu Llaw Gyffes is another example of that custom. His mother lays a curse on him: he'll never have a name, or weapons, or a wife. Those were the very things a boy needed to become a man (let alone a king), and the first two had to be given by his mother. His uncle, who raised him when his mother rejected him at birth, tricks her into giving him the first two and comes up with a creative loophole for the third. When Lleu is finally married, he has land, property, a castle... he's the king. (It doesn't really work out that well, in the end, but that's another story.)

 

So, is that idea that the setting isn’t “equal” in the ideal way and is instead a pretense of equality or that the virtue of “equality” is justification for the gender-stratified society?
That seems to make sense if that’s what you’re going for.

Also, should I take your previous post to mean that, so far, you just have this setting premise and not any actual story ironed-out yet? I mean, it’s fine if you don’t but if you do, it’d be good for the discussion if you share a bit of what you got so far. It’ll help us suggest where you might want to go from here.

 

There's a lot to digest here. First of, if you want actual legal advise, don't ask it on a random forum on the internet. While some people here might be IP lawyers, they still wouldn't know the specific details of your story. And the rest of us are just using what we read somewhere and common sense.

With that in mind, as others mentioned, you can't copyright or trademark an idea. Copyright applies to the specific text. You can write a story about a boy who goes to a wizarding school which is hidden from the real world and he battles an evil dark lord at the end of each school year, without violating any copyright. Of course, once you start adding in specifics from Harry Potter then you might get into trouble.

Trademark is the protection of specific terms and names etc. You can't have Hobbits or Middle Earth or Hogwarts or anything like that in your story.

The same applies to your story idea. Yes, people will have had it before. But then, there are only 3, 4, 7, 9 or 30 different stories out there anyway (depending on who you ask). So everything has been done before. It is how you weave it into a story and your specific writing style that matters, not the world itself. So, write your story. Unless you specifically set out to copy someone it's almost impossible to do so.

If you want similar stories, the Stormlight Archive has already been mentioned (and I think it does a pretty good job of it). Another is The Wheel of Time, which creates the divide on women being able to do magic while men can't.

 

I haven't read any novels like this, but it does remind me of something. I have a 1970's dungeons and dragons monster manual, and in it it said that in mermaid societies, men and women live in different areas. However, I don't think it's too similar, so I think you should go for it.

 

I sincerely doubt you can be sued by a subculture (if I understand you correctly). Defamation is all about traducing individuals.

If you're more worried about copyright, if you haven't read a particular book then the chances of you ripping it off to the extent required by the law are astronomical. So don't worry about it.

As for your OP gender roles. Polynesian society was frequently matriarchal - not least because the male warriors didn't live long enough to take up administrative roles.

Of course, like all general statements, that is a gross over-simplification.