The study of three Golden Age plays with an all-female group of undergraduate students led to class discussions about contemporary everyday violence against women. Those discussions prompted these reflections of the role of teaching and translating as performative and potentially transformative acts. In this respect, the university classroom is studied as the site for understanding how the subject matter of Spanish Golden Age plays lives and how we become its translators. Based on present-day stories of female and feminist experience, the essay explores questions of intellectual and ideological subjectivity in translation and the ways in which a feminist being-in-the-work might operate as the site from which the target text is approached and to which it might be drawn. Working with the consciousness of the mobilising of subject position with a historical context, the essay then explores the writing, in the past and present, of the female subject in La vengadora de las mujeres by Lope de Vega and Los empeños de una casa by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.