When the Porte de Rouen area of Honfleur was being renovated, the mayor, Michel Lamarre, wanted to pay homage to the women who for decades had worked in the estuary and other places collecting mussels to feed their families, often at risk of their lives. They wore long pleated dresses and scarves around their heads to protect them from the wind or sun, or men's clothing. They used an étique, a knife with a round wooden handle and a blade the shape of an ivy leaf, sharpened on one side. They collected their food in ten-kilo jute containers, which they roughly stitched up and in turn loaded them into thirty-kilo sacks which they put in flat-bottomed boats. The last women mussel pickers had gone by the late 1970s. The sculpture is the work of Jean-Marc de Pas from Haute Normandie.
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