Carolyn Sargent is an American medical anthropologist who is Professor Emerita of Sociocultural Anthropology and of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Washington University in St.
She has done fieldwork in Benin[4][5] and Mali[6] in West Africa,[7] Jamaica and the Caribbean,[8] and with immigrant women in France where she worked on reproductive health, midwifery, prenatal care, migrant fertility patterns, and medical decision-making.
[13] In 1968, Carolyn Helen Fishel graduated from Michigan State University with High Honors and a Bachelor of Arts.
Sargent received a Marshall Scholarship,[18] which finances up to forty young Americans annually to study at the University of Manchester.
[19] In 1971, Carolyn Fishel married Merritt W. Sargent of East Lansing, and joined him at a base in Natitingou, West Africa to work on a Peace Corps project.
[21] In 2008 she became a professor at Washington University in St. Louis, in the department of anthropology's Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies Program.
[19] During her time in the Peace Corps, Sargent worked in a maternity clinic that primarily catered to elite women.
[20] Over the years, Sargent's interests expanded to include medical ethics, immigrant health and the ways in which state institutions interact with the healthcare system and the provision of care.