It's too bad, because economically it makes total sense. It might just have been too ambitious to definitely locate the phenomenon in time and space(in European middle ages). It probably took place then to some limited degree quantitatively, but the qualitative change came later and closer to modern times.

I'm still convinced by the core economic idea, I just think about it happening mostly after the enclosure of the commons: The division between paid productive labor and unpaid reproductive work is useful for capital in dividing the working class and providing an initial push for the circulation of capital similar to the enclosure of the commons and colonialism. But it also creates a contradiction. And while this is not the first origin of patriarchy, it determines the form that patriarchy takes under capitalism.

1.) About the dividing the working class part: I imagine male workers, who were driven from their land and whos commons were confiscated, who had to move to the cities work nothing but their ability to work, who still remember the ability to live off the land first and only then surrender part of the harvest as surplus. They are made complicit in their own exploitation by the promise, that, when they come home from the factories and mines, at least they are the absolute patriarchal ruler of the household, served by women and children. The newly doubly free worker might even have asked: "But how am I ever going to marry, if I have nothing to my name? Which woman, or her family, would accept me?". And the new version of patriarchy answered:"Don't worry, for they will have even less than you. Without wages or land or commons they will depend on you and be forced to serve you".

But most of this probably took place after the middle ages during industrialization. If one really wants to find the early beginnings of this in history, I think it would be worthwhile to look at medieval Italian city states and later the Dutch trade and finance empire, like Giovanni Arrighi does in "the long twentieth century", except with a feminist lense.

2.) About the part on an initial push for the economy: This is tricky to locate historically without extensive economic data, because there is a dialectic at play here. Depending on the development of the productive capacities, class conciseness and the rate of profit, it can be advantageous for capital to have women and children work for wages in factories or for free at home. That's why capitals approach shifted multiple times over history and the corresponding ideology shifted with it. It's roughly similar to how both outsourcing and inhousing can be advantageous for companies, both mergers and splits, depending on circumstances.

In the same way, women and children where in some places put to work first in factories, because they were easier to exploit than men. Later they were told to stay at home when men were integrated into the work force and unpaid reproductive labor contributed indirectly to profits, as long as profits were high and margins large. Then in our times, they were told to get a job and shoulder the double burden of productive and reproductive work, because the rate of profit fell fast enough and other possibilities to expand the circulation of capital were exhausted. And now this helps to expand the mass of capital by enlarging the workforce and even keep up profits too by keeping wages low. Both became necessary under circumstances of a falling rate of profit and smaller margins and fewer markets left for capitalism to expand too.

All this complicates matters and some (not all) of the critique against Federici might even come from misunderstanding dialectics, where people assume cause and effect are always linear and always point in the same direction, disregarding the totality. Like in the linked post, where the author claims that some portion of women marrying late and working in cities at some point in time disproves the core of Federicis thesis. It doesn't from an economic perspective, but I get why it can be disappointing for historians.

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