  This chapter discusses the most striking change related to day care and motherhood: how mothers were beginning to insist that they had a right to day care. The information presented in this chapter supports the argument that the postwar period was truly a time of change. During this time new ideas regarding the basic job of mothers appeared, which challenged the previous assumptions on which day care provision had previously been based.  This introductory chapter begins with a description of Stalin's relationship with his entourage in the years after World War II. It tells the story of an aging and distrustful despot who habitually 