I admit I usually prefer fantasy RPs to realistic historical ones, but I'm talking low-level fantasy; no magic or anything, but I do like being able to drop some of the horrible, horrible baggage of real life cultures while still keeping the cool and interesting stuff, And maybe 'technology levels' isn't the right phrase, but to clarify, in this setting I mostly just mean common sense stuff like 'hey guys, maybe we should bathe occasionally and also not throw rotting corpses directly into the river we drink from' just being accepted as an understood thing. (In other settings it would mean things like sweet custom crossbows and rich people with indoor plumbing, but let's not go crazy here, I understand you want to keep it historical-ish and our characters are supposed to be a bunch of exiled losers anyway... :P )
As far as my question about gender roles, I just brought it up because I was concerned it wouldn't really be realistic to play an unmarried woman who just kind of wanders around doing her own thing...I don't really mind her being looked down on for it though, and I guess I'd be playing her as some kind of foreigner anyway.
Or I could just rework the whole character concept. None of this is set in stone, I just sort of jumped in with the kind of char I usually play. I'll just wait and see if anyone else joins first though and maybe tweak mine a little to fit better.