It seemed a happy coincidence when Ken Burns’s two-part series, “Not for Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony,” began its brief run on PBS (where else?) on the same day that Naomi Wolf appeared on “This Week” on ABC to explain a report in Time magazine that she had been hired by the presidential campaign of Vice President Gore at $15,000 a month (later reduced to $5000) to advise him on how to look more like an “alpha male.” This he was to do by (among other things, presumably) wearing suits in “earth tones.” The juxtaposition was too delicious. What, one wondered, would Mrs. Stanton and Miss Anthony have thought about the seemliness of this young celebrator of female “promiscuities” explaining the principle on which the hard-won women’s ballot is to be cast in the next presidential election? More recent feminists have told us that the personal is the political, but even they can hardly have foreseen just how personal the political was to have become by the end of the millennium.

Indeed, loose talk about “alpha males” suggests that it has become not so much personal as animal, as if it were perfectly natural to think of the democratic politics of a highly developed human society as if it were homologous with the hierarchical disposition of a pack of wolves (or Wolfs?) or a troop of baboons, as this was generally thought to be the nearer parallel. The “alpha male” in