Anna M. Ranck, née Kammerer (1874-1956), was a missionary, educator, radio broadcaster, and a member of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) for over fifty years. Ranck was the Director of Temperance and Missions for the National WCTU for ten years and held the title of Special Worker with Orientals for at least twenty years, during which she organized with Asian American members of the WCTU, supported Asian Americans displaced by Japanese internment, and held WCTU Interracial Friendship Meetings in efforts to integrate the ranks of the organization. Ranck was also the secretary of the WCTU Home for Women in Los Angeles and a lead overseer of the Iota WCTU, the young women's branch of the organization.

Ranck's career runs parallel to the period that the WCTU was at the height of its influence. During the early twentieth century, WCTU membership peaked at over 750,000 members, and it became the largest women's organization in the United States. Ranck's involvement with the WCTU began during her thirty-year tenure as a missionary in Japan and China. During her initial missionary travels, Ranck founded the Tokyo Bible School, which became one of the largest Christian schools in Japan. Ranck went on to manage a network of a dozen Bible schools. Ranck spoke both Chinese and Japanese, and she worked with a Japanese writer to compile an eleven-chapter textbook on the geography of the Bible.

During her mission trip, Ranck met her future husband, the Reverend Charles E. Ranck, a missionary in China. They married and moved to Hollywood, where they worked together for decades in organizing, teaching, and writing. The couple had two children: Esther Marguerita, who also became a WCTU member; and James Gilmore, a teacher and Navy Chaplain whose name appears in the collection as the editor of an issue of the Christian periodical The Endeavourer.

Ranck earned an undergraduate degree at a seminary in her home state of Kansas before leaving for Japan, and she continued to study at the university level in Los Angeles. This archive includes several examples of her coursework in a History of Chinese Philosophy Course taught by a Professor Long, including papers on Confucian analects and the history of logic in Chinese philosophy. Ranck earned a Master's degree in philosophy, possibly from UCLA, which established their Department of Oriental languages (now Asian Languages and Cultures) in 1947 (USC did not establish an East Asian Studies Department until 1960). A Professor Long who taught at UCLA in 1960 and perhaps earlier may be the Professor Long documented in this collection.

Beginning in 1936, Ranck worked as the Director of the Radio Department of the WCTU of Southern California. Until at least 1944, she delivered lectures on air. Ranck's radio broadcasts and their focus on international cooperation between women demonstrate the WCTU's efforts toward advancing women's rights. Though temperance advocates are often characterized as dour conservatives, many of these women were suffragists, abolitionists, and overall political radicals who saw temperance a crucial part of the fight for equality.

Ranck held high-level positions at both the local and national levels of the WCTU, and her career coincided with a period of growth in the WCTU's history. When she began her tenure as Director of Temperance and Missions for the National WCTU, there were twenty-four states with chapters of the organization; by the end of her tenure, every state had at least one chapter. Similarly, there were nine Light Line unions (small local groups that donated to the WCTU) in Southern California when Ranck took the role; by the time she retired, there were nearly two hundred.