Women? in a fantasy roleplaying game?

    We’ve moved on from negative strength modifiers. Classes and backgrounds are for everyone and all. Rangers, woodcarvers, foragers, barber-surgeons; women have certainly performed these duties in the past but where are the midwives and fishwives; milk maids and bal maidens; laundresses and herring lasses— backgrounds that are explicitly feminine and of course hugely important to their communities.

    What if by excluding backgrounds associated with women we're implicitly saying that the women of history weren't significant and aren't interesting enough to roleplay.  Most people rightfully throw away gender roles in their fantasy settings. I assume, right? But the roles that women had would still be necessary for societies to function.   

    A few months ago I submitted something to the femininomenon jam. Two backgrounds inspired by the above thoughts; fishwife and herring lass. Today I finished another, Milk Maid (warning, Mork Borg). The challenge the jam posed was straightforward but not so simple— make a feminine game. I perhaps subverted that a little, but I wanted to bring some femininity to a genre with traditionally masculine roots.

    Maybe the choice to play a milk maid is an important one to have.