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For me, the central premise sounds intriguing but IMHO it's poorly developed.
I had problems taking the ban of steerwomen seriously, since I kept thinking "barring magic, how would it be enforced? We have steerwomen wandering in the field for years, how would they know if a particular person has been banned? If I'm banned by a steerwoman, and the ban may take years to go into effect from her comrades (if at all), it kinda undermines its threat. An what the other steerwomen receive? Names? Drawings of faces? For well known persons it's easy, but for regular town dwellers sounds tricky.
An besides, the fact that I personally may not receive information is moot, because a group that has as a mission the dissemination of knowledge for hundreds of years will inevitably make common knowledge all that they know. I think it would have been best if refusing to answer to a steerwoman was a social gaffe or something similar.
Also, I think that the escape from the wizard stronghold is full of plot holes, including but not limited to the damage that a black powder explosion causes.
I also find hard to believe that the wizards can maintain absolute secrecy after hundreds of years of employing peasants, and ultimately can't see the reason or benefit of maintaining such wide technological gap. There are so many things that are hinted at, but not justified enough in the story to allow me to 'live' in this world, I simply could not connect with it.
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