To challenge gender discrimination and to secure the world's prosperity and peace, we urgently need pro-girls and pro-women policies in the contemporary, globally developing world. Such policies could mark an era of building greater gender equality across the world by sheltering domains of women's well-being that are shown to decline. These needs can be best summarized by Kofi Annan, Secretary General of the United Nations in 2005: "When women are fully involved, the benefits can be seen immediately: families are healthier, they are better fed, their income, savings and reinvestment go up. And what is true for families is true of communities and, eventually, of whole countries." The desperately needed gender equality would honor women's place in the world, would greatly honor each country's political constituencies and enrich democratic institutions. This volume of Research in Political Sociology addresses a broad range of gender equality issues from women's status and opportunities at work, education, health, political participation, community involvement and global migration; from a vast domain of countries in Europe, America, Australia, Asia and Africa.

Knighthood and chivalry are commonly associated with courtly aristocracy and military prowess. Instead of focusing on the relationship between chivalry and nobility, Jesus D. Rodriguez-Velasco asks different questions. Does chivalry have anything to do with the emergence of an urban bourgeoisie? If so, how? And in a more general sense, what is the importance of chivalry in inventing and modifying a social class?In "Order and Chivalry," Rodriguez-Velasco explores the role of chivalry in the emergence of the middle class in an increasingly urbanized fourteenth-century Castile. The book considers how secular, urban knighthood organizations came to life and created their own rules, which differed from martial and religiously oriented ideas of chivalry and knighthood. It delves into the cultural and legal processes that created orders of society as well as orders of knights. The first of these chivalric orders was the exclusively noble Castilian Orden de la Banda, or Order of the Sash, established by King Alfonso XI. Soon after that order was created, others appeared that drew membership from city-dwelling, bourgeois commoners. City institutions with ties to monarchy--including the Brotherhood of Knights and the Confraternities of Santa Maria de Gamonal and Santiago de Burgos--produced chivalric rules and statutes that redefined the privileges and political structures of urban society. By analyzing these foundational documents, such as "Libro de la Banda," "Order and Chivalry" reveals how the poetics of order operated within the medieval Iberian world and beyond to transform the idea of the city and the practice of citizenship.