Eileithyia or Ilithyia was the Greek goddess of childbirth and midwifery. In the cave of Amnisos she was related with the annual birth of the divine child, her cult is connected with Enesidaon, the chthonic aspect of the god Poseidon, it is possible. In his Seventh Nemean Ode, Pindar refers to her as the maid to or seated beside the Moirai and responsible for creating offspring; the earliest form of the name is the Mycenaean Greek, e-re-u-ti-ja, written in the Linear B syllabic script. Ilithyia is the latinisation of Εἰλείθυια; the etymology of the name is uncertain. R. S. P. Beekes suggests a not Indo-European etymology, Nilsson believes that the name is Pre-Greek. 19th-century scholars suggested that the name is Greek, derived from the verb eleutho, "to bring", the goddess thus being The Bringer. Walter Burkert believes that Eileithyia is the Greek goddess of birth and that her name is pure Greek. However, the relation with the Greek prefix ἐλεύθ is uncertain, because the prefix appears in some pre-Greek toponyms like Ἐλευθέρνα.

Her name Ἐλυσία in Laconia and Messene relates her with the month Eleusinios and Eleusis. Nilsson believes. According to F. Willets, "The links between Eileithyia, an earlier Minoan goddess, a still earlier Neolithic prototype are firm; the continuity of her cult depends upon the unchanging concept of her function. Eileithyia was the goddess of childbirth. To Homer, she is "the goddess of childbirth"; the Iliad pictures Eileithyia alone, or sometimes multiplied, as the Eileithyiai: And as when the sharp dart striketh a woman in travail, the piercing dart that the Eilithyiae, the goddesses of childbirth, send—even the daughters of Hera that have in their keeping bitter pangs. A poem at the Greek Anthology Book 6, mention Eileithyia as Hera's daughter, but Pausanias, writing in the 2nd century AD, reported another early source: "The Lycian Olen, an earlier poet, who composed for the Delians, among other hymns, one to Eileithyia, styles her'the clever spinner' identifying her with Fate, makes her older than Cronus."

Being the youngest born to Gaia, Cronus was a Titan of the first generation and he was identified as the father of Zeus. The meticulously accurate mythographer Pindar makes no mention of Zeus: Eleithuia, seated beside the deep-thinking Fates, hear me, creator of offspring, child of Hera great in strength. For the Classical Greeks, "She is associated with Artemis and Hera," Burkert asserts, "but develops no character of her own". In the Orphic Hymn to Prothyraeia, the association of a goddess of childbirth as an epithet of virginal Artemis, making the death-dealing huntress "she who comes to the aid of women in childbirth,", would be inexplicable in purely Olympian terms: When racked with labour pangs, sore distressedthe sex invoke thee, as the soul's sure rest. Artemis Eileithyia, venerable power,who bringest relief in labour's dreadful hour, thus Aelian in the 3rd century AD could refer to "Artemis of the child-bed". The Beauty of Durrës, a large 4th-century B. C. E. Mosaic showing the head figure of a woman portrays the goddess Eileithyia.

Vase-painters, when illustrating the birth of Athena from Zeus' head, may show two assisting Eileithyiai, with their hands raised in the epiphany gesture. As the primary goddess of childbirth along with Artemis, Eileithyia had numerous shrines in many locations in Greece dating from Neolithic to Roman times, indicating that she was important to pregnant women and their families. People would pray for and leave offerings for aid in fertility, safe childbirth, or thanks for a successful birth. Archeological evidence of terracotta votives figurines depicting children found at shines and holy sites dedicated to Eileithyia suggest that she was a kourotrophic divinity, whom parents would have prayed to for protection and care of their children. Midwives had an essential role in ancient Greek society with women of all classes were midwives participating in the profession, with many being slaves with only empirical training or some theoretical training in obstetrics and gynecology. More educated midwives from higher classes, were referred to as iatrenes or doctors of women’s diseases and would be respected as physicians.

She was invoked by women in labour, to further the birth. Callimachus recorded the hymn: "Even so again, come thou when Kykainis calls, to bless her pains with easy birth, she was connected with the goddesses Artemis and Hekate, the latter of whom she shared strong chthonic elements to her cult. There were ancient icons of Eileithyia at Athens, one said to have been brought from Crete, according to Pausanias, who mentioned shrines to Eileithyia in Tegea and Argos, with an important shrine in Aigion. Eileithyia, along with Artemis and Persephone, is shown carrying torc

Akiko Ichikawa is a New York City-based interdisciplinary artist, writer-editor, activist. She has exhibited her work in The Hague, New York City, Washington D. C. Philadelphia, Newark, St. Paul, in South Korea and Sweden and has written on contemporary art and culture for Flash Art, Art in America and Hyperallergic. A graduate of Brown University and New York City's Hunter College's MFA studio program, her Hyperallergic article on the photography of Dorothea Lange, Toyo Miyatake, Ansel Adams at Manzanar went viral in fall 2016, following comments by a spokesperson of a Trump-supporting PAC on Fox News. Born in Sagamihara, Japan, Ichikawa's family emigrated to the United States, via San Francisco, when she was three, she grew up in the suburbs of Boston and Nashville, with a brother and a sister, attending courses in photography and painting and drawing at Vanderbilt University while still in high school. Ichikawa attended Brown University studying Visual Art under Annette Lemieux, Leslie Bostrom, Walter Feldman, graduating with honors.

She moved to New York City four days using the award money from the Roberta Joslin Art award to pay for her first month's rent of a studio apartment in the East Village. After working in book publishing, she entered Hunter's MFA program a year and a half where she studied with Gretchen Bender, Robert Morris, Andrea Blum, among others, she lives and works in Brooklyn. Ichikawa's conceptually-based artwork exists as performance and net.art. The performances include a series of site-specific gifting work titled Limited, Limited Edition in which she painted t-shirts with Japanese text informed by the neighborhood in which she gave the shirts away at low-cost: either translations of message shirts she saw in or inspired by the area, she presented the first iteration of this work at Socrates Sculpture Park, in Long Island City, Queens. C. For Bad Kanji, she painted temporary kanji tattoos on viewers at the Spring/Break Art Show in 2015, held in the historic office spaces above New York City's James A. Farley Post Office.

The work was reviewed favorably. Ichikawa operates as an art historian, having enacted two of Fluxus-member Alison Knowles's event scores, namely #5 Wounded Furniture and #3 Nivea Cream Piece; the latter was live-blogged online and well-received, with Hyperallergic's Kyle Chayka writing that it was "definitely among favorites." In 2015, Ichikawa wrote about the Japanese American incarceration through the photography of Dorothea Lange, Ansel Adams, Toyo Miyatake for Hyperallergic, which went viral, shared over 8,000 times on Facebook. In 2018, she reminded New York art world readers about the Golden Venture incident, which marked the start of contemporary punitive U. S. immigration policies under President Clinton. In the Aughts, she created an Internet art piece that simulated a series of imagined art installations; the multi-hyphenate has created a series of Facebook groups themed around food organized by color, touching upon issues of cultural identity, food sourcing, environmental concerns, greenwashing while sharing nutrition and cost-cutting tips: I ♥ Yellow Food, I ♥ Orange Food, I ♥ Red Food, I ♥ Green Food, I ♥ Blue Food.

While not supportive of Facebook's history of massive online-privacy violations, its carrying the 2016 Republican National Convention, along with other mainstream media, its other roles in the empowerment of Trump's presidential candidacy, she viewed the social media site as an effective, user-friendly way to include as many participants as possible, as as possible. She has turned to Instagram, bought by the company in 2012. Ichikawa's art before 2005 was in installation art, built around the placement and assembly of basic construction materials in galleries and other spaces, she presented one such piece as her solo exhibition at Momenta Art and another at Andrew Kreps gallery in a group exhibition curated by Dean Daderko, now a curator at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. The series evolved into a Net.art piece, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?, permanently stored on Rhizome.org. She has written on contemporary art for Flash Art on the work of Ken Lum, Laurel Nakadate, Dan Peterson, Yasue Maetake, for NY Arts magazine, the work of British artists Jane and Louise Wilson and for zingmagazine, the work of Iranian-American public artist Siah Armajani.

In 2015, Ichikawa wrote about the photography of Dorothea Lange, Ansel Adams, Toyo Miyatake and the Japanese American incarceration for Hyperallergic. The article received its biggest spike in interest after the spokesman of a Trump-supporting PAC, in early November 2016, cited the incarceration as precedent for a Muslim registry on Fox News. In 2018, she reviewed the folded paper work of the Golden Venture migrants held in York, Pennsylvania, exhibited at Manhattan Chinatown's Museum of Chinese in America. Ichikawa wrote about the closing of the Manhattan Tekserve store, the performance by a group of young area Native American musicians at Rutgers University in 2016, cowrote about the work of young artists of Asian descent in a New York City-based performance art festival the next year. In 2018, she wrote about the paper-folding work of the Golden Venture migr

Schwadernau is a municipality in the Biel/Bienne administrative district in the canton of Bern in Switzerland. Schwadernau is first mentioned in 1269 as Swadernouwa. A number of artifacts indicate that the area around Schwadernau has been inhabited since the Upper Paleolithic. In addition to neolithic finds, many Bronze Age, Roman era and early medieval objects indicate that there were other prehistoric settlements near the modern municipality. A depot of iron ingots and the remains of a Roman wall show that there may have been a workshop or small settlement near the Räbhubel or Scheurenhubel. During the Middle Ages, the village was owned by the Counts of Neuchâtel-Nidau. In 1281, the Count gave about half of the village to the Prince-Bishop of Basel. In 1376 the Counts of Kyburg and Thierstein fought and defeated the Bishop of Basel outside Schwadernau. In 1398 the entire Inselgau region, including Schwadernau, was acquired by the city of Bern. Under Bernese rule, the village became part of the parish of Bürglen.

The Jura water correction projects and the construction of the Nidau-Büren Canal between 1868 and 1875 drained the marshes around the village, prevented flooding and opened up rich farmland. Today one-fourth of the jobs in the village are in agriculture. Schwadernau has an area of 4.15 km2. As of 2012, a total of 3.06 km2 or 73.9% is used for agricultural purposes, while 0.6 km2 or 14.5% is forested. The rest of the municipality is 0.42 km2 or 10.1% is settled, 0.04 km2 or 1.0% is either rivers or lakes. During the same year and buildings made up 5.6% and transportation infrastructure made up 3.6%. A total of 13.3% of the total land area is forested and 1.2% is covered with orchards or small clusters of trees. Of the agricultural land, 63.5% is used for growing crops and 7.5% is pasturage, while 2.9% is used for orchards or vine crops. All the water in the municipality is flowing water; the municipality is located between the old course of the Aare river. On 31 December 2009 the municipality's former district, was dissolved.

On the following day, 1 January 2010, it joined the newly created Verwaltungskreis Biel/Bienne. The blazon of the municipal coat of arms is Gules two Tournament Lances Argent in saltire and a Mullet of the same in chief. Schwadernau has a population of 662; as of 2010, 6.8% of the population are resident foreign nationals. Over the last 10 years the population has changed at a rate of -1.2%. Migration accounted for -0.8%, while births and deaths accounted for -0.2%. Most of the population speaks German as their first language, French is the second most common and Serbo-Croatian is the third. There are 4 people; as of 2008, the population was 50.5 % female. The population was made up of 26 non-Swiss men. There were 313 1 non-Swiss women. Of the population in the municipality, 160 or about 23.9% were born in Schwadernau and lived there in 2000. There were 308 or 46.0% who were born in the same canton, while 119 or 17.8% were born somewhere else in Switzerland, 75 or 11.2% were born outside of Switzerland.

As of 2011, children and teenagers make up 22.3% of the population, while adults make up 59.3% and seniors make up 18.3%. As of 2000, there were 254 people who never married in the municipality. There were 29 individuals who are divorced; as of 2010, there were 76 households that consist of only one person and 17 households with five or more people. In 2000, a total of 253 apartments were permanently occupied, while 11 apartments were seasonally occupied and 9 apartments were empty; as of 2010, the construction rate of new housing units was 12.2 new units per 1000 residents. The vacancy rate for the municipality, in 2012, was 1.95%. In 2011, single family homes made up 64.7% of the total housing in the municipality. The historical population is given in the following chart: In the 2011 federal election the most popular party was the Swiss People's Party which received 41% of the vote; the next three most popular parties were the Conservative Democratic Party, the Social Democratic Party and the Evangelical People's Party.

In the federal election, a total of 216 votes were cast, the voter turnout was 44.4%. As of 2011, Schwadernau had an unemployment rate of 1.17%. As of 2008, there were a total of 162 people employed in the municipality. Of these, there were 60 people employed in the primary economic sector and about 18 businesses involved in this sector. 21 people were employed in the secondary sector and there were 6 businesses in this sector. 81 people were employed with 13 businesses in this sector. There were 350 residents of the municipality who were employed in some capacity, of which females made up 43.1% of the workforce. In 2008 there were a total of 116 full-time equivalent jobs; the number of jobs in the primary sector was 39, of which 34 were in agriculture and 6 were in forestry or lumber production. The number of jobs in the secondary sector was 19 of which 12 or were in manufacturing and 7 were in construction; the number of jobs in the tertiary sector was 58. In the tertiary sector.