My friend Sarah Hipperson, who has died aged 90, was a midwife, magistrate, activist and author dedicated to creating a nuclear-free world.

In 1983, at the age of 55, Sarah joined the women’s peace camp at Yellow Gate, outside the main gate of the USAF/RAF air base in Greenham Common, Berkshire. For the next 17 years, this would be the community from which she protested against nuclear war.

When she wrote later that “non-violence is neither an easy nor a soft option”, it was from experience – her non-violent direct actions led her to receive 22 prison sentences.

She never paid a fine to the courts, and she always argued her own defence, that nuclear weapons are genocidal and as such contravene international laws of conflict. She summed up the UK’s national defence policy as “illegal, immoral, insane”.

Born Sarah Hanlon in Glasgow, she had a tough and at times impoverished upbringing and was raised by her grandmother. Her childhood experiences of wartime air raids planted the seeds of her political awareness. In 1946 she began nursing training at Glasgow Royal Infirmary, having convinced the applications matron that, despite having none of the required school certificates, she had enough determination to learn.

As a registered nurse and midwife, she cared for people in their own homes in the city and the surrounding area. She later emigrated with a nurse friend to Canada, where she met and married Al Hipperson, and raised their family of four sons and a daughter.

Returning to the UK in the late 1960s, they settled in Wanstead, east London. Sarah served as a magistrate in the late 70s. She marched with CND and organised a church group to raise awareness of the threat of nuclear weapons.

In 1982 she became a founding member of Catholic Peace Action. She took her first non-violent direct action with this group – they scattered blood and ashes outside the Ministry of Defence in London, symbolising the consequences of nuclear war – which led to her first prison sentence.

Underpinning all of Sarah’s actions was her strong, lifelong Catholic faith. She found shared values in her friendships with the Jesuit priest Gerry Hughes, the civil rights activist Sister Sarah Clarke and in correspondence with the American peace activists the Berrigan brothers.

She was one of the last women remaining at the peace camp when it closed in 2000 and worked tirelessly to establish the commemorative site created where it stood, which remains at Greenham Common today. One of her essays, which was written at Greenham in 1986, is anthologised in the Penguin Book of Twentieth Century Protest (1998) and remains one of the century’s finest on non-violence.

In Sarah’s book Greenham Common: Non-Violent Women v The Crown Prerogative (2005), she documented her many legal challenges and her life’s journey toward the practice of non-violence.

She is survived by her husband, their children, Mark, Matt, Martin, Ali and Jane, and six grandchildren.